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This book should have been more interesting than it was. The book is about two adult siblings who decide to find their birth mothers, but the large cast of incredibly unlikable characters really ruins this book. The focus shifts from character to character for no discernible reason. The book doesn’t show Nathalie’s first conversation with her birth mother or David meeting his biological siblings, yet randomly shows Nathalie’s partner’s employee wondering why her crush hasn’t noticed her haircut. The dialogue is unrealistic and needlessly loaded with exposition. The characters react selfishly and unbelievably to every situation.

Interesting subject matter but the characters have hyperbolic responses to the search for their birth mothers and the family drama that ensues reads like a TV script for day time soap. Could Nathalie have been that insensitive to the love offered by her adoptive mother all her life? I can't relate to Cora's stiff upper lip and her reason for not being able to love her 2nd born son could not be based on such an asinine relationship with the fun-away Rory. The Winnipeg mother of 3 was a caricature of dedicated motherhood taken to a fault. I did not like any of these characters and I would cross the street to avoid meeting them.

This is a story of adoption. Two adoptees from different mothers brought up as brother and sister, who as adults locate their birth mothers. This act of curiosity opens both their lives and the lives of those closest to them to all kinds of questions and concerns and a re-balancing relationships. Like all of Trollope's novels, her characters speak like real people and react like real people. She mirrors society in that her books are about relationships and she always chooses current topics to bounce her characters off.

sharonb122
Oct 19, 2012

An interesting perspective on how adoption touches the lives of many people and how people do not have to be blood related to create family and be bound by love--and the opposite: blood does not always create a bond.

cljubic
Sep 21, 2011

Its a 'meh' book...Had a lot potential with the topic, but I couldnt warm up to any of the characters...especially one of the main characters Nathalie...
Theres better books out there.

This is a novel I found admirable but not always enjoyable. Adult adoptees with children of their own search for their birth mothers, and the effects ripple out to more and more people. There's a lot of unhappiness and disappointment in this book. I did love the way all the characters are so interesting and fully fleshed: young and old, related by blood or choice, whatever their stage of life, they all matter and are interconnected. It's extremely well-written. I just didn't find the resolution satisfying. Maybe just a little more time with the characters to see things working out would have helped, but then real life seldom has tidy endings.

he had not, in his heart of hearts, accepted the ban as final. He had chosen, rather, to hear it as something his parents would prefer not to know about rather than something he would be punished for persisting in.

The next question, Daniel knew, should have been, 'What's the matter?' but it was a difficult question. Sometimes you wanted it asked very badly and sometimes you hated having it asked, and if you had to do the asking there might be all kinds of stuff that followed that made you feel like you did when you tried to pull just one towel down out of the airing cupboard and the whole lot fell out instead and came out of its folds and turned having a simple shower into an episode.

She remembered them all talking at her, social workers, the adoption people, her parents, and they said to her that if she was selfish enough to keep the baby that showed she was immature and an unfit mother. When she said that maybe if she had enough support she could manage with the baby, even finish her schooling, they said her feelings were not now of consequence, that she had used up her share of indulgence in that department with her promiscuity and her fertility.

It was love, the kind of passionate, vulnerable, craving love that nobody in their right minds would ever seek but that, once you had known it, successfully drained the colour out of all other more manageable loves.